About
Sarah is a contemporary artist, creative writer and poet, harbouring a love for juxtapositions with photography, digital illustration and ink.
Central to her practice is lens-based art, where she picks at various binaries with her videography and photography. She remains especially interested in the dichotomies between devotion and indifference.
Highlighted by Sarah's compositional techniques and choice of foci, the familiarity of her subject matter—often everyday events and objects—clash with a surreal portrayal of their image. Zoomed into, zoomed out of, overexposed, underexposed—each piece in her chosen narrative crystallises into a sharp, slight pinch of uncanniness, targeting a limbo state between disturbance and nostalgia. The intimacy in her works, while frank, stays between staged and candid.
Steeped with gentle detail, carefully constructed scenes shape Sarah's visuals across her multimedia works. Under her lens, moments from her past and present resurface, immortalised several fragments at once; corpse-cold tenderness, heated in hearth-warm irony. Plunged into the uncertainty of the future, desire comes quietly, in the nicks between each image, the break between line and colour.
Sarah's current body of work reflects the shapeshifting relationship between presence and absence, challenging the idea of 'emptiness' with perishable objects.
Plastic photographs all over a table with a stack of books
the coin is also a sun
the coin is also a sun aims to investigate the fickle nature of myth—the decay of meaning through the artist’s preserving of real events into symbolic stills.
Photographs of decay in nature, various natural and synthetic textures, and homemade object photography lay together with iambic poetry, all printed on transparencies before they are cast through a clear file suspended from the ceiling.
With the images spread out out on a table, viewers are invited to gather any one they choose, slotting them into the file. Their projections float around on a foam board against an easel, mimicking painting with ephemeral, interchangeable shadows of composite images.
Through the audience’s own compositions, unstable narratives and beliefs spawn from this lack of clarity, subverting the purpose of light as a way to remove doubt. The project subsequently aims to resolve this uncertainty through encouraging negative capability, as in the poetry of John Keats—to “reject[...] set philosophies” (Goellnicht 5).
Everyday processes, apprehended by these stills, merge and blend with each other by the viewers' own hands. The artist stays detached from meaning-making beyond the preservation of events, toeing the line between 'creating' and merely 'putting-together'. In interpretation, audiences try, struggle and fail to form coherent narratives, and instead resign themselves to the beauty of the stills on their own.
For a coin is also the sun.
We will grow it and shrink it as we so will it.
Photographs on a table with easel in the background
Iman Nuriyah Sim
Merc (Min Yu Naing)
Vera Ananda Binte Muhamad Shaiful
Lucas Leong (梁晋源)
Tan Shu Tsi Elisa
Nur Syuhadah Binte Suhaimi
